Going to the Corner: National Review's Corner, That Is...

Jay "Id" Nordlinger:

Encore: I’m going to sneak in one more letter… one of our regular readers from Georgia…. "The Right can’t field a better candidate. We put up an impressive, mainstream guy with super credentials, who made few gaffes, did well in the debates, and was amply funded. The result? A repeat of 2008, basically. If I’d known it would turn out like this, I would have backed a Gingrich-Palin ticket. More fun, less expensive — same result."

Mark "Fear the Hispanic Pizza Menace!" Krikorian:

Immigration & Delusion: Hispanic political activists are “the vanguard of a different culture that they passionately believe is superior to the culture of individual liberty” who won’t be attracted to conservatism by a few changes in immigration law…

And Daniel Foster along with Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh Ponnuru launches The War Against Those Who Fought Against the War on Nate Silver;

On the Beatification of Nate Silver: I… found Nate Silver skepticism a respectable position… [on]the occasion of his elevation to sainthood by liberals… [and] their usual, empty, ritualistic signification of “math!” and “science!”… [I have] one more thing to say….

[B]y the end Silver’s famed model was… a different way of presenting a variety of polling averages. It was not sorcery… all the decimal places were too cute by half… [the] “Science Bless You! Haha Lolz” crowd are… cult members… journalists writing dire warnings about global warming or activists campaigning against intelligent design could learn about long-term climate modeling or the mechanisms of natural selection if they wanted to doesn’t change the fact most of them don’t….

[T]he question of “why didn’t conservative believe the polls?” and what that means for the future… are askable and answerable without ever making reference to Silver…. [C]onservatives… failed to internalize the fact that there are simply more Democrats than there were ten years ago…

Jonah Goldberg:

The Critique of Nate Silver’s Pure Reason: [P]eople talk about math as if it were divinely prophetic… subscribe to a religion that simply apes the terminology of science…. [Q]uestioning [Silver's] methodology is akin to rejecting evolution or the laws of thermodynamics, as if only his model is sanctified by the god Reason…. [P]eople are different, more open to reason, and that the soul — particularly when multiplied into the complexity of a society — is not so easily number-crunched. Obviously this is a romantic view out of step with the times… the “age of chivalry is gone,” replaced by “that of sophisters, economists and calculators.” Still, isn’t it possible that the passionate defense Silver arouses from some people on the left has just a bit more to do with the comfort he dispenses than with the sophistication of his analysis?

John O'Sullivan raises the spectre of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan:

On Whites in the Minority: [I]t would be false comfort (and the kind of irresponsible optimism I detest) not to mention a darker possibility. That possibility is that whites will develop a defensive minority consciousness in response both to their statistically weaker position…. When their collective power was numerically unassailable, they felt able to extend generous concessions to other groups. When they feel threatened, they defend every item of privilege and resent every loss. Further, such hostile and defensive attitudes are more likely to spread when others are rejoicing in their fall from grace. Maybe the Internet has done no more than bring to light what was already present under stones and lichen, but I find some of racial slurs and insults around this theme on the Web slightly alarming…. [A] racial concept of American identity might gain ground in the circumstances of America’s whites losing their majority status…

Andy McCarthy:

Immigration & Delusion: Today’s bromides about [immigrants being] “aspiring people who believe in the dignity of work and self-sufficiency” are of a piece with the Journal’s similar soft-spot for the “Arab Spring” and Muslim outreach. These GOP fantasies are similarly based on the wishful thinking that Islamists are also “cultural conservatives”…. Falling in love with your own high-minded rhetoric is no substitute for clear-eyed examination that takes the world as it is…. Islamists, like many Hispanic political activists (think: La Raza), are statists… their thoroughgoing alliance with the American Left is ideologically based — it is not a product of insensitive messaging or “Islamophobia.” Islamists revile finance capitalism, favor redistributionist economic policies, and endorse nanny state regulatory suffocation as well as an ever-expanding welfare state…. Islamists, like many Hispanic activists, are the vanguard of a different culture that they passionately believe is superior to the culture of individual liberty…. [M]ake the unapologetic case for liberty and limited government; or fundamentally change who you are, meaning accommodate their statism.

And Yuval Levin doubles down on self-deportation as a policy goal:

The Election and the Right: [T]he notion that Republicans must now adjust their positions to make an essentially race-based appeal to Hispanics and craven interest-group appeals elsewhere strikes me as very wrong-headed….

[T]he story of this election is… exceptionally depressed turnout of… Republican[s]. Those were after all the two parts of President Obama’s cynical and substance-free campaign strategy: to work the most intensely committed and reliable parts of his base into a frenzy while persuading the least committed and reliable part of the Republican base (white working-class voters) that Mitt Romney didn’t deserve their support so they should just sit it out… using any low and mendacious tactic required to tell working-class voters (especially white, Midwestern ones) that Mitt Romney was an evil and uncaring plutocrat….

[Do] not… start shifting policy positions based on the demographics of election returns…. The Democratic Party is mostly an incoherent amalgam of interest groups, most of which are vying for benefits for themselves and their members at the expense of other Americans. This kind of party is why America’s founders worried about partisanship and were, at least at first, eager to avoid…. The argument that any individual (and therefore party) should just change substantive positions (especially on crucially important issues) because there is more of one kind of voter or another than there used to be is just not a serious argument…. We do have what this moment requires, and with the right mix of well-conceived policy and smart and savvy argument we can show American voters as much—whatever their ethnicity.

David French avoids saying that it is hard to convince non-rich voters that you care about them when your standard-bearer says that he does not:

Conservatives’ Terrifying Message: To tens of millions of American voters, a conservative message of self-reliance and individual economic freedom is, quite frankly, terrifying…. Obama’s core constituencies (single women, African-Americans, and Latinos) is seriously — and disproportionately — economically disadvantaged compared to the classic paradigm of the white, college-educated Republican voter…. Within [the] liberal bubble, it is simply conventional wisdom that conservatives not only don’t care about those less fortunate but that we will even promote human suffering if it means higher profit margins and more cash in our pockets…. Republicans have now lost five of the last six popular votes for president, with our last convincing wins occurring well before the advent of our vaunted new media — back when the MSM was the only game in town. Recent conservative “wave” elections have only occurred during off-years (1994 and 2010) when the electorate is tens of millions of voters smaller than it is in presidential years. Simply put, the larger the potential electorate, the worse we tend to do….

[I]t means breaking the public-school monopoly, influencing public schools even while we work to diminish their influence, sending our best and brightest young writers and actors into the lion’s den of Hollywood, working to reform higher education and breaking the ideological hammerlock of the hard Left on faculties, and working hard — very hard — to tell the true story of conservative compassion for the “least of these,” a story featuring the efficiency and creativity of private philanthropy combined with Christ-centered love and concern for the individual.

Michael Walsh:

Nice Guys Finish Second: When “electability” and “reaching across the aisle” are personified in a middling candidate at the presidential level, they lose…. For four years, [Obama] rolled off the actual duties of the Oval Office job to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, Kathleen Sebelius and a host of other czars and surrogates while he played “the president” on television, speechifying, golfing, partying and never missing an opportunity to attack and humiliate his political “enemies”…. [W]hen his president needed him to uphold Obamacare, John Roberts rolled right over, assuring his place in legal infamy forever….

Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock… blew up their own candidacies by foolishly wandering into the social-issue minefields and detonating on contact with the very issue former Clinton hack turned “newsman” George Stephanopoulos so skillfully planted…. [ T]he Republicans should never again agree to any debate moderated by any member of the MSM, most especially including former Democratic apparatchiks like Stephanopoulos…. [T]he Republicans should immediately begin constructing their own media operation, one that exists independently of the series of the teetering black monoliths that line Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue near Rockefeller Center… big GOP money should henceforth divert at least a tiny fraction of the dough it poured into Karl Rove’s useless American Crossroads super PAC and its ilk and establish its own, alternative media (not Fox News) that functions both as a sword and shield against the decaying, corrupt journalistic establishment…. [We] can’t win without a media operation that can neutralize the 15 to 20 points that MSM advocacy regularly contributes to the Democrats….

Second, lay off the social issues. Let me be blunt: Conservatives have lost that war, and last night’s defeats are just the beginning. As with Griswold and Roe, the times they are a’changing….

The polls were right all along, and the prolonged delusion that they were somehow “skewed” turned out to be a disastrous bedtime story…. The forces set in motion by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 have now reached their majority….

[F]or Romney\… I have mixed feelings. Like John McCain, he never really took the fight to Obama and, more important, Obamaism; he spectacularly refused to engage the Democrats on an ideological level…. He’s a good man, but a bad candidate…

I have a very good friend who is a hard lefty…. He… answered that, no, removing money from the hands of the rich was a good in itself, regardless of the revenue raised….

I have met many, many such people in my life. Here’s a note from a friend and colleague of mine from Macedonia:

The whole string of countries from Estonia through Poland and Hungary and then down to us are developing into work-in-progress but still solid free-market countries, on account of being liberated at a time when the U.S. still exported freedom. Anyone planning on leaving the U.S. can choose a city with fine opera.

A reader from Wisconsin said he was having “a Michelle Obama moment”…. For the first time, he was ashamed of his country.

We have done this with our eyes wide open. How are we anything but a decade or two behind Europe?…. [H]ow is my Marine aviator son supposed to serve proudly and boldly under a craven commander-in-chief? Especially after Benghazi?

Comments

Going to the Corner: National Review's Corner, That Is...

Jay "Id" Nordlinger:

Encore: I’m going to sneak in one more letter… one of our regular readers from Georgia…. "The Right can’t field a better candidate. We put up an impressive, mainstream guy with super credentials, who made few gaffes, did well in the debates, and was amply funded. The result? A repeat of 2008, basically. If I’d known it would turn out like this, I would have backed a Gingrich-Palin ticket. More fun, less expensive — same result."

Mark "Fear the Hispanic Pizza Menace!" Krikorian:

Immigration & Delusion: Hispanic political activists are “the vanguard of a different culture that they passionately believe is superior to the culture of individual liberty” who won’t be attracted to conservatism by a few changes in immigration law…

And Daniel Foster along with Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh Ponnuru launches The War Against Those Who Fought Against the War on Nate Silver;

On the Beatification of Nate Silver: I… found Nate Silver skepticism a respectable position… [on]the occasion of his elevation to sainthood by liberals… [and] their usual, empty, ritualistic signification of “math!” and “science!”… [I have] one more thing to say….

[B]y the end Silver’s famed model was… a different way of presenting a variety of polling averages. It was not sorcery… all the decimal places were too cute by half… [the] “Science Bless You! Haha Lolz” crowd are… cult members… journalists writing dire warnings about global warming or activists campaigning against intelligent design could learn about long-term climate modeling or the mechanisms of natural selection if they wanted to doesn’t change the fact most of them don’t….

[T]he question of “why didn’t conservative believe the polls?” and what that means for the future… are askable and answerable without ever making reference to Silver…. [C]onservatives… failed to internalize the fact that there are simply more Democrats than there were ten years ago…

Jonah Goldberg:

The Critique of Nate Silver’s Pure Reason: [P]eople talk about math as if it were divinely prophetic… subscribe to a religion that simply apes the terminology of science…. [Q]uestioning [Silver's] methodology is akin to rejecting evolution or the laws of thermodynamics, as if only his model is sanctified by the god Reason…. [P]eople are different, more open to reason, and that the soul — particularly when multiplied into the complexity of a society — is not so easily number-crunched. Obviously this is a romantic view out of step with the times… the “age of chivalry is gone,” replaced by “that of sophisters, economists and calculators.” Still, isn’t it possible that the passionate defense Silver arouses from some people on the left has just a bit more to do with the comfort he dispenses than with the sophistication of his analysis?